


Understanding

by cynicalwerewolf



Category: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-01
Updated: 2014-01-01
Packaged: 2018-01-06 23:49:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1112962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cynicalwerewolf/pseuds/cynicalwerewolf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Finding a way forward when the floor has just dropped out from beneath your feet can be tricky.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Innocent Bystander, or "That's my story and I'm sticking to it"

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by [ExtraPenguin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ExtraPenguin/pseuds/ExtraPenguin) in the [Bujold_Ficathon_2013](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Bujold_Ficathon_2013) collection. 



> **Prompt:**
> 
>  
> 
> Set at the end of _Cetaganda_.  
>  The Cetagandan style is to eliminate all possible witnesses to ghem-General Neru's failure. Dag Benin is on the list. He decides to hitch a ride to Barrayar with Miles and Ivan.  
> Work can be slashy, hurt/comforty, angsty, or even a humorous chronicle of culture shock.
> 
> Squeaking in before the new year. I had to change events from the books in order to fit the prompt, and I'm not quite satisfied with the ending, but hopefully I've left things open enough that any problems could be rectified in a sequel.
> 
> Hope you enjoy it.

Miles waited until he saw the Celestial Garden receding before he turned to address Ivan, “After we get back to the embassy, pack your luggage. We’re leaving as soon as you’re done.”

Ivan nodded his agreement, but Colonel Vorreedi snidely asked, “Fleeing into the night with your treason?”

With a look that should have incinerated the officer, Miles bit out, “If you must know, Emperor Giaja informed me that, because of internal maneuvering between and within the Star Crèche, the haut governors, and the ghem leadership, it would be very wise for meddling Barrayaran barbarians to take their leave of Cetagandan space. Immediately.”

 _So_ , Ivan thought, _not only was the little bugger having his usual post-mission crash, he didn’t even get a pat on the head for his success. And I have to ride home with him._

Ivan shook his head. He’d hoped that Fletchir Giaja was bright enough to ascertain the proper care and feeding of Miles in the interest of maintaining the peace of the Empires, but apparently the Cetagandan Emperor was too stuck in haut mode to recognize Miles’s own statements about the proper care and feeding of manic Vorkosigans.

Not that Vorreedi was doing much better at understanding how Miles worked. Challenging the little bugger was more dangerous than motivating him.

Maybe.

More dangerous to yourself, anyway.

Motivation, on the other hand, was more dangerous to any innocent bystanders. God only knew that it was all the immediate family could do to keep Miles as controlled as he was.

Ivan suspected that being nominally in command of Miles was similar to having a pet tiger. You never knew what dismembered, bloody mess he would bring, with great pride, to lay at your feet. Probably dropping it on your obscenely expensive antique rug. And you would have to pet him and tell him what a wonderful tiger he was while trying to figure out how to clean the mess, who you were going to have to write letters of condolence to, and all that fun stuff.

And you couldn’t keep him in, because if he was confined to the house he’d be causing mayhem _inside_ , rather than _outside_. And he got homicidally and suicidally bored if you locked him up in a place where he couldn’t get into trouble and once he managed to get out he made at least five times the trouble he would have if he’d been allowed out in the first place.

Fortunately, that was Gregor and Illyan’s problem. Keeping Miles in line was above Ivan’s pay grade, although he did his best when Miles-sitting fell to him.

Come to think of it, ‘line’ was probably an inaccurate description of Miles’s thought processes, which were far more akin to a corkscrew than a linear system. Or even a curvilinear system…Perhaps a five-space algebra problem would describe them…

And damn was Ivan far too tired if he was trying to describe Miles’s thought processes in a rational manner.

While Ivan desperately wanted to place the entire blame for this mess on Miles, he knew that he bore some of the responsibility. Miles hadn’t been the only one blinded to Cetaganda’s flaws by the beauty of its women.

The main difference was that Miles had to do everything _bigger_. Ivan still went green at the _thought_ of driving through the Dendarii Gorge at night.

It was times like this when Ivan wondered if, in some other universe where Miles hadn’t been poisoned before birth with soltoxin, if Miles would have suppressed his Vorkosigan instincts to be the best in his field and have much more in common with Ivan.

Personally, Ivan found it easier to picture a universe where this whole fiasco ended with Miles being crowned Emperor of Cetaganda.

That hypothetical situation was entertaining enough that Ivan spent the rest of the trip back to the embassy playing with it. Doing that was more interesting than watching Miles and Vorreedi having a glaring contest. ImpSec men were worse than cats, and Miles was the worst of all ImpSec men. Little bugger would probably start chewing on Vorreedi’s ear in about two and a half minutes…

Good thing they were only two minutes away from the Embassy, as Ivan estimated they were about three minutes from needing to clean Vorreedi’s blood out of the upholstery.

They reached the Embassy without bloodshed. Ivan leapt from the groundcar and was on his way to his assigned quarters before his cousin and Vorreedi started in on each other.

Nothing in the suite appeared out of place, but Ivan unpacked and checked all his gear before repacking his kit.

Miles took longer than Ivan had expected, only making his appearance when Ivan was mostly finished. From the look on his face, there had been a talk with Vorreedi which had gone exactly like Ivan had expected. Not wanting to get caught in the splatter radius, or murder investigation as the case might be, Ivan picked up his gear and left the room, although he didn’t go far.

Just to be certain Miles didn’t manage to find more trouble.

At least that’s what he told himself.

Miles took less time to check and pack than Ivan, and within three minutes he made his way down the stairs. A sergeant, a middling sized man in the uniform of an official embassy guard, was waiting at the groundcar. The man looked as though he might attempt to help them with their gear before thinking the better of it.

Which was good, because Ivan didn’t want to be cleaning the noncom’s blood out of his uniform.

Something about the sergeant was raising a faint note of concern, but Ivan couldn’t quite figure out what it was that worried him. A glance at Miles to see if his cousin recognized the sergeant didn’t net any clues, so Ivan forced himself to put the worry out of mind.

At least for the moment.

There was so much else to worry about right now it was quite easy to do.

* * *

To Ivan’s surprise, the sergeant had his gear packed and was coming back to Barrayar with them.

Equally surprising was Miles’s insistence on inspecting the man’s luggage as thoroughly as he had checked his own.

The pilot hadn’t spent all his time on Eta Ceta onboard the courier, although when the situation started deteriorating he had transferred his quarters from the embassy back to the ship. This period of vacancy had left opportunity for sabotage.

The examination Miles insisted upon carrying out on the ship meant that all Ivan and the sergeant had to do was staring awkwardly at each other, although the sergeant was careful to never meet Ivan’s gaze. Ivan had tried to strike up a conversation, but when all he’d gotten was a non-verbal stonewalling he’d given up.

It was giving him a chance to try and understand what was bothering him about the other man. 

Unfortunately, Miles interrupted his train of thought again, “Everything checks.”

Ivan and the sergeant picked up their gear and proceeded to the bunkrooms. Ivan had his gear stowed before he realized that not only hadn’t Miles followed him in, it was the pilot’s gear that was stowed in this room, rather than Miles’s. Which meant Miles must have stashed his stuff in the opposite one with the sergeant.

Wait…

Ivan remembered the sergeant’s care to not meet his eyes. Despite the man’s efforts to prevent that, he had seen those eyes, both then…and before.

Swearing under his breath, Ivan slipped out of his quarters, across the hallway, and into the other bunkroom.

And stopped in the doorway.

Dag Benin was indeed there, and he was with Miles, but those were the only similarities between Ivan’s fears and the reality.

Although Ivan didn’t want to consider the ramifications of what he was seeing.

Miles and Dag Benin were on the lower bunk. Miles was facing away from the door, but Ivan had rarely seen the lack of tension in Miles’s small frame, and he was curled up beside the Cetagandan like a cat against a favorite person. Benin was gripping Miles with the hold of a drowning man on anything that would support him.

Both professional paranoids must be exhausted. Neither had so much as twitched when Ivan opened the door. 

Pursing his lips, Ivan considered the situation.

After a moment’s thought, he left the room. There would be time enough to ask Miles what he was thinking and grill Benin on his intentions later. Right now, Miles wouldn’t thank Ivan for interfering, and the Cetagandans weren’t stupid enough to try and send a man who was already known to be a Cetagandan agent to Barrayar openly.

At least, Ivan assumed they weren’t. They hadn’t recognized how to handle Barrayarans, after all. 

Whatever was going on here, it was bound to be political.

And complicated. It couldn’t be anything else, since Miles was involved.

Mournfully thinking of the mess he was going to try and explain to Captain Illyan and -God help him- Miles’s _parents_ …

Was it too late to try and run away from home? If Gregor could manage it, how hard could it be for mere Ivan Vorpatril to slip away…?

No. His mother would send all of ImpSec after him, and there would be more of a mess than this whole thing would cause, and Miles would gloat, and….

Shaking his head regretfully, Ivan dropped himself onto his bunk, flung an arm over his eyes, and longed to be an innocent bystander.


	2. Officer and a Gentleman, or "He followed me home, can I keep him?"

Dag had quite the ear for accents. Halfway to Barrayar and not only could he perfectly imitate Ivan’s Russo-French Vorbarr Sultana accent, but could approximate the more Cyrillic Vorkosigan District accent, and was coming closer to achieving the even thicker Dendarii Mountains dialect and the jump-pilot’s very Greek Vorharpulos District accent.

Which was a very good thing. To say that Cetagandans were unpopular on Barrayar was to say that Beta Colony was a little dry, or a black hole produced a little gravity, and Dag wouldn’t even have the tenuous protection of the Embassy to fall back on. The better he could fit in…

Of course, that assumed Simon would let him out of ImpSec Headquarters sometime in the next few decades.

Or at all.

Or that Miles wasn’t taking him to a death just as certain as remaining on Cetaganda would have been for Dag. He’d like to believe he wasn’t, but right now he had no confidence in his own judgment and full confidence in prejudices coming out at the worst possible time.

It was fortunate that Ivan wasn’t as prejudiced about homosexual activity as many Barrayaran men, because he’d walked in on Miles and Dag sleeping together.

That was all they’d done, though. Miles was too uncertain of his feelings to give more of himself, and he wasn’t going to ask of Dag anything that he wasn’t willing to give in return. The other man deserved better than to be used again.

Miles had done too much of that himself.

_Damn stupid boy_ , he berated himself. Playing games with lives like that.

Although he was almost certain things had turned out…perhaps not as well as they could have, but better than many other options. He was certain that if he had done as Ivan had wanted and turned over the false Key, the paths would have led to the destruction of Barrayar.

Especially after Ba Lura turned up dead. If they’d turned the Key in, with the truth and having the only witnesses themselves and the jump pilot, it would have become the destruction of a prized experiment of the Star Crèche and sabotage of the most sacred object of the Cetagandan Empire.

Vorreedi would have insisted that Ambassador Vorob’yev hold the Key hostage for concessions, which may have worked with an object precious only to the ghem but would be disastrous with one essential to the existence of the haut. While Miles felt he could have told Vorob’yev, Vorreedi was another matter altogether, and he knew which of them the Ambassador would have chosen to believe if it had come down to conflicting recommendations. He would have chosen the man he had worked with for years.

Part of that may have been Miles’s…subordination problem, but part of it was he hadn’t gotten the same good feeling about Vorreedi as Ivan has. Of course, Ivan probably hadn’t been given the quickly suppressed, but still present, disgusted look that Miles had received. The same look that Ungari, Metzov, and many other superior officers had given Miles’s deformities. Most had, like Vorreedi, covered it with a politer expression, but that didn’t negate its initial presence. Or the fact that Vorreedi had looked through Miles in the same manner as the haut had.

Only the haut had started to listen to Miles once they realized his suggestions made sense, and that his knowledge base could supplement their own.

Despite the fact that Miles and Ivan had managed to uncover more about the workings of the haut in a week than Barrayaran Intelligence had managed in decades.

He’d really have to talk to Simon about that lack of information. Even with the possibility of a period of seclusion on the horizon for Cetaganda, knowledge about current events and what might emerge from a period of seclusion would be key, even if that seclusion lasted for decades.

In the unlikely event that the Cetagandans had given in to any Barrayaran demands, the false Key would discovered within the Crèche to be a forgery, and that knowledge would propagate throughout both haut and ghem society, as rumor was the only thing acknowledged to travel faster than light.

The negative possibilities only snowballed from there. But Miles couldn’t think of any way that course of events could have ended well.

Of course, most of this rumination was frantic spin. Miles only knew what had happened, not whether his actions had made things better than worse.

He hoped that on average matters had become better. But for people he actually cared about, things seemed to become worse.

Someone entered the bunkroom. From the footsteps, it was Dag; the stride was too short for Ivan and too light for Commander Simonides.

“Miles,” Dag said with a softness that Miles knew was sheath for a razor wit able to be brought to bear at a moment’s notice. That gentleness only made Miles feel guiltier. “You need to eat something. You have brooded all morning. And half of the afternoon.”

“Post-mission depression,” Miles answered, “Just ask Ivan.” _And leave me alone with my guilt._

“I did,” Dag was closer, right beside the bunk. Without asking Miles’s permission, the former Cetagandan officer sat down beside Miles and rested a hand on his back.

Miles shivered and tried to bury himself, an attempt that would have been much more effective with real blankets on the bunk.

He had expected something more, perhaps along the lines of Ivan’s unsubtle methods of getting Miles out of bed when his cousin was feeling down. Instead, Dag remained silent for a time, letting Miles adjust to his presence.

Just as Miles was almost relaxed enough to sleep, Dag began to speak, gentle voice masking a slight bitterness and more than a little weariness of his own. And underneath it all, a deep pain that spoke a deeper truth than fast penta could bring forth.

Nothing that painful could be falsehood. Lies never evoked the question of whether the speaker was barely holding back tears…or screams.

“The man who raised me is not my grandfather, although he permits me his name and allows me to use the term in reference to him. He was a low ranking officer in the intelligence corps during the Barrayaran War.”

Dag made a noise that could almost pass for amused. “He survived through being politically tone-deaf. And having an astute eye for convenient attempts at enforced suicide. He was…not a man who suffered foolishness silently, and was most outspoken in his opinions about his commander’s failures in strategy and tactics. While it made him exceedingly unpopular with is commanders, it protected him from the taint of their eventual failures. His wife- was another matter altogether.”

Dag’s tone went very dark. Almost without thought, Miles sat up, squirmed his way out from under the flimsies pretending to be blankets, and moved so he was sitting alongside Dag, head resting against the other man’s shoulder and both hands gripping Dag’s left.

While anyone who was merely seeing the Cetagandan would have seen no difference in his bearing, Miles could feel a minute release of tension from Dag’s muscles, as though Miles’s act of comfort and active listening had lifted a part, however minor, of some great burden.

“My grandmother was…far more politically tone-deaf than Grandfather. And lacked his skills in avoiding the consequences of her lack of insight. Whilst he was posted on Barrayar she…began a liaison with a hyaku man.”

Miles blinked, trying to translate the last term. Cetagandan was derived from Japanese sprinkled with Indian terminology, as was their political system at some level. Dag, however, had been speaking in the mostly English-derived lingua franca of the Nexus until that word.

‘Hyaku’…Peasant, Miles decided, was the best translation. An individual from the conquered populaces under the authority of both ghem and haut. The man in question had likely been very low status; there must be more refined terms for those who approached the ghem in social standing, if not in official status.

But Dag was continuing his recitation, inexorably moving towards what Miles sensed was the heart of the matter, “She maintained this relationship even after Grandfather returned. With his blessing, for he was uninterested in sexual relations with anyone. Particularly not with a woman.”

“However, she wanted something more, this woman who would become my grandmother. She was a brilliant geneticist, for a ghem, and with the tacit approval of her haut supervisor she forged a child, the gene-child of herself and her hyaku lover. My father.”

Well, Miles had recognized that Dag couldn’t have much, if any, haut in him; he was too short and his features were too coarse. It was unsurprising that he was only three-quarters ghem, give or take, for much the same reason. The haut influence on the ghem phenotype was obvious once you knew it was there.

The concept of ‘forging’ a child was also most intriguing. Miles wondered what the Cetagandans called raising children. He doubted it was a term that translated to anything he was used to being applied to the process.

It was then that what was bothering him about this recitation crystallized.

The emotions were genuine, but were so painful that he doubted Dag would ever disclose this information to even his closest confidants.

Which, despite a certain amount of physical and emotional comforting having been provided and reciprocated, Miles wasn’t. So something else must be prompting this surfeit of information. Perhaps the need to be accepted within the Barrayaran Empire to emplace a sleeper agent?

It was a clever ruse. And if it failed- well, who would demand an accounting for the life of a disgraced bastard of low breeding? One already under a death sentence for his actions against the political aspirations of a very powerful clan. 

Miles felt his anger building. Not at Dag, who was only following the orders of his Emperor; instead it was focused at Giaja and the system he represented. There were commanders in every military who considered their soldiers expendable, but Miles had never heard of a cultural system so determined to treat its lower orders like poor quality tools, to be used until they broke under the strain and then discarded.

Perhaps the haut considered their ‘exalted’ breeding as carte blanche to experiment on, test to destruction, and otherwise use and abuse their social inferiors at their convenience, but their inhuman disregard made Miles think that they had jettisoned too much of humanity in their forging, and had lessened themselves rather than bettering themselves.

Thoughts, conclusions, and potential courses of action arced through Miles’s mind with lightning speed. Dismissing them, and the decision he knew had to be made, with great effort, Miles pulled his attention back to Dag’s story.

“I know not what happened to my grandmother or her haut confederate, only that their fate was unpleasant enough that, although it was a public execution, no one speaks of the sentence even after the passage of time has distanced memories from reality. The hyaku man who was my gene-grandfather disappeared shortly thereafter, leaving behind only a few distant family members and my grandfather to wonder about his ultimate disposition.”

“My father…had he been forged, born, and cultivated-” the Cetagandans did use a different term for the rearing of a child, “-in the prescribed manner, he would have been one of the greatest political minds of his generation once achieved the proper weight of years. However, with the genetic legacy gifted him, the position he was gifted, as he was gifted his wife and genes, was by the son of a haut-bride.”

Miles looked up at Dag’s face. He hadn’t done so since the beginning of this recitation. It was amazing how open, even vulnerable, an unpainted ghem face was. While Dag was clearly attempting to hold his features expressionless, the lack of paint seemed to amplify even the slightest shift of the facial muscles.

At the moment, Dag’s expression mixed grief, anger, and a sharp, ironic amusement. “My father never had a complaint about his employment, but knowing the man in question, he made extensive use of my father’s political acumen while heaping endless scorn onto my father’s head. The man in question had mediocre political sense of his own, and before my father came into his employ had only achieved rank by way of his genetic legacy.”

Dag gave a fluid shrug, and with false lightness, continued, “My father died in a lightflyer accident during my second year of officer’s training. Shortly thereafter, a detailed exposé of his demi-haut employer was delivered to the appropriate authorities and the man in question was later discovered drowned in an ornamental fish pond on his father’s Tau Cetan estate. It was ruled an accidental misadventure.”

An explanation only marginally more believable than Ivan’s ‘twenty stab wounds in the back’ case of suicide.

From what Dag was carefully not saying, his father probably had committed suicide in a manner that wouldn’t create such stigma that it would damage his son’s chances of advancement, however small those had been. For an individual with such great disadvantages, Dag must be brilliant at intelligence work to achieve the rank of ghem-Colonel.

Dag sighed, “I have expected something like this to happen for so long, its occurrence is almost a relief. I just wish…”

Miles couldn’t stop himself. He climbed into Dag’s lap and said, “Cetaganda doesn’t deserve you. Not as it is.” He felt Dag tense, just briefly, but long enough for Miles to know that Dag had understood Miles knew that Dag hadn’t completely abandoned his empire.

Gently, Miles raised a finger to Dag’s lips, indicating that the other man should let him continue. “I’m not asking for your decision right now. I will be reporting to Simon Illyan upon our arrival. My recommendations will depend on the choice you make. I don’t think service to Cetaganda and service to Barrayar are mutually exclusive. It will just take some time to decide on how best to serve both.”

The expression in Dag’s eyes, which had grown hopeless when Miles had said that he would report to Simon lightened minutely. There wasn’t any emotion so positive as hope, in them, but there was something more than utter despair.

“Ivan won’t be interrupting us. My only request for now is this,” Miles began to unfasten his jacket closures. He wasn’t certain why, but he knew what he wanted now.

What he needed now, as he had never needed anything before, even though this was the first time this desire had confronted him.

Dag’s gaze was locked on Miles’s hands. That focus gave Miles the impetus to continue, “Care for me…Let’s forget Cetaganda and Barrayar, just for now.”

Miles couldn’t let himself ask for any sort of affection. He knew that he was very close to falling for Dag, so close that to merely speak the emotion would be to court despair, as it had with Elena, and Rian. It would break his heart if he voiced that emotion to have it be rejected.

Especially to lose the other man to Cetaganda. Miles couldn’t let himself hope that Dag would try and find a different way forward. And even if he tried, there was nothing certain they would be permitted to try.

But brown eyes closed briefly and Dag bowed his head before lifting his hands to help Miles with his uniform. With a tremulous whisper that told Miles that Dag was fighting a similar war with his own emotions, the other man, just a man for now and not the confident ghem-officer or the Cetagandan spy, Dag whispered, “Yes.”


	3. Forward Momentum, or "The road less traveled by"

The fast courier had just passed through Sergyaran space and Dag still could not see a way out of his dilemma.

While Dag cared for Miles, an affection that was only becoming stronger with their continued association, he still loved Cetaganda. The relationship might be neglectful, possibly even abusive, but it was all Dag had ever known.

All Dag had ever wanted.

And now? Now he was an exile.

Oh, Emperor Giaja had prettied the sentence up a bit, called it a reconnaissance mission to understand the greatest threat to the Cetagandan Empire, but they both knew what it truly was. To return to Cetaganda would mean his death, and only the possibility that he might be of further use had stayed the Emperor’s hand in giving the Naru clan what they demanded.

And now, with his feelings torn between long love and stormy, new affection, Dag almost felt the best course, the simplest course, would be to walk out of the airlock of the fast courier.

With a sigh, Dag stretched himself out on the bunk he and Miles had been sharing.

The equanimity with which both the jump-pilot and Lord Vorpatril had accepted his and Miles’s liaison was astonishing. The acceptance of Miles to a relationship the younger man freely admitted was unfamiliar to him was almost beyond belief. Barrayaran society was known for its homophobia.

Truth to tell, Cetaganda was not open to the possibility of homosexual relationships, either. While both androgenic and parthenogenic techniques were known, any woman or man who attempted to form a legal partnership with another of their sex would attract negative attention. The partner who would attract the most would be the person of lower status or the individual who was perceived as acting more outside their gender role, if such private matters were even semi-common knowledge.

Or supposition as the case might be.

Dag almost wished that he could show Cetagandan society what Miles was like. Even in apparent submission, Miles was the driving force in their physical relationship, the controlling individual, the active partner.

With a shake of his head, Dag reminded himself that what he knew for certain only applied to ghem society. He knew not what the case might be amongst the haut, although he suspected that the matter was irrelevant, as the only haut who married were the Emperor and the Handmaiden of the Star Crèche. The Emperor was not even wed to the Consorts, for all they also received the title of Empress. Haut brides, the only individuals of haut blood integrated into ghem society, were no longer accorded the privileges which defined the haut.

Miles had raised legitimate concerns with regards to the stagnancy of the Cetagandan nobility in their discussions before he had determined the nature of Dag’s assignment. Dag longed for the easy conversations of that first week. Miles had been on an emotional downturn, but in between depressive incidents, there had been some intriguing conversations. Conversations that had only contributed to Dag's understanding as to why no ghem woman had ever caught his attention. The women of the Cetagandan nobility had so narrowed their interest that no ghem-woman dared confess that she was uninterested in genetics. Other activities might be acceptable as hobbies, but never as an avocation.

The longest romantic relationship Dag had ever pursued was with a hyaku-woman informant. She had been placed on permanent assignment to Xi Ceta, but her passion had been social historic investigation, a course of study she had interested Dag in as well. Her passion for social history had been equal to Miles's for...almost everything.

Perhaps that was why he and Miles had discussed the matters in such a fashion.

From Dag's analysis, for all that the more ‘enlightened’ Nexus sneered at Barrayaran Vor and resultant noblesse oblige, the fact remained that the system worked. True, it had almost broken down twice in the near century that Barrayar had been involved with Nexial society, not including the Barrayaran-Cetagandan wars, but it had been restored with only what modifications were necessary to avoid a repeat occurrence while not damaging the useful components, which was more than could be said about a number of more ‘enlightened’ regimes.

Barrayar was not perfect. The tendency to cling to ‘traditional’ methodologies without examination of both the modern and historical contexts, and when the tradition was inserted into the culture, was rife in the society. Hopefully, as Barrayarans became more accustomed to the wider Nexus, some compromises would occur.

Cetaganda had not done so, but the youthful Barrayaran Empire had already taken great strides forward in integrating its society into the Nexus without losing the shape it had been gifted by centuries of isolation.

If only Cetaganda could manage…

Dag swore with delight as a wonderful, mad plan sprung into being, mad as the course Miles had charted from the Great Key falling into his hands.

Perhaps he had found his way forward.

* * *

“So, Giaja didn’t order you to get any military secrets?” Miles had started the conversation on the bunk, holding one of Dag’s hands, but when Dag began to outline his idea, the other man had thrown himself off the bunk and begun pacing frantically.

Dag suspected this was good sign. It seemed that an energetic Miles was a strategizing Miles, which could only help this idea not fail catastrophically.

“No. Emperor Giaja felt that my skills were better served in cataloguing weaknesses within the Barrayaran cultural system and the political and economic infrastructure. Other agents can find some, but with any Cetagandan known to be acting with the consent of the Empire you Barrayarans shield your weaknesses. He thought an exile might be able to clarify some matters.”

“And you are offering to give both the Cetagandan Intelligence Service and Barrayaran Imperial Security a catalogue of both Barrayaran _and_ Cetagandan strengths, weaknesses, and habits in these areas.” Miles sounded a little disbelieving, but mostly thoughtful.

That was the core of Dag's plan. While such weaknesses might be known to the empire in question, knowledge that their rival empire would also know that weakness would, in an ideal world, lead to compensation or a fixing of the problem. Knowledge of strengths was important to counterbalance the knowledge of weaknesses, so that in attempting to solve the problem, matters that did not require change to improve significantly would be left alone. And habits should be recognized, even if they were not in and of themselves a strength or a weakness. General knowledge about the contents and use of the full available toolkit was almost always better than detailed knowledge of any individual tool.

“Yes. I will not betray any Imperial secrets. I will only catalogue what I see with the eye of an outside observer.” Which Dag had been all his life. While he had served Cetaganda faithfully, he had never been a part of its society.

“And you want my help with holding people down long enough to listen, and hopefully not kill you just to be safe?”

Miles was not pulling his blows. Dag winced and decided not to respond, as the answer was obvious.

The other man made a soft humming sound, as though he had just eaten a delectable treat. “I will not promise anything. But…” Dag watched Miles throw himself from one wall to another with smitten fondness.

After a few minutes, Miles stopped ricocheting off the walls and flung himself onto the bunk and into Dag’s arms. With as firm an embrace as Miles could manage, Miles rested his head on Dag’s shoulder and smiled, “Yes. It’ll take some very careful framing of the truth, but if it can be done, I’ll do it.”

From anyone else, that statement would convey unbearable arrogance. From Miles, who had challenged the Cetagandan Emperor in person, it was portrayed as simple fact.

Even as Miles began to outline his strategy and potential tactics to be used in any foreseeable situation, they both knew it would be a difficult way forward. Their physical relationship would be considered unacceptable to many, if Miles even decided to pursue it once the need for physical affection had lessened. Dag’s status as open Cetagandan exile and spy might bring about his death upon arrival. Miles’s plan might not succeed, and might even bring about his own death.

But for the moment, with Miles gazing up at him with unfeigned affection, grey eyes glowing with passion for a well-organized plot and even a hint of desire, Dag felt that the greatest miracle had already occurred.

And if the gods had seen fit to grant him this, a man who could become a partner in all things, act as personal steamroller, and possibly even become a long-term lover, they could grant him anything.


End file.
